Today was a bit of strange day, mostly because there was no physics in the mix. Only had a couple of those days but they usually leave me feeling like I’ve forgotten something! But of course I have not, because I have my schedule all written out for the week. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail, after all. Or because I’m kind of ridiculous. (Like how my boyfriend teased me about writing up a packing list—complete with expected activities and weather forecast—for a 4 day trip. I swear that’s just conscientious, not crazy!)
Anyway, I started out bright and early (okay, it’s a lie, I didn’t get out of bed until 9, but I did get started right away after I got up!) and got Python running and waiting for some juicy new code. I worked through two more sections in the introductory chapter of the text, covering if/then/else and while loops, lists, arrays, and a few other items. The arrays were new to me, and I still mentally giggle at the “numpy” package, but they seem like they will be very useful indeed. I ran into a problem while trying to write a small program to display the first several Catalan numbers. This should have been straightforward, and I reviewed my logic a hundred times and it was impeccable. After much frustration and some poking around Stack Overflow, I realized I just had to move one of the calculations from outside the loop to inside it. I was ready to rage-quit, but it was so simple in the end! Writing code in a nutshell, I suppose.
After a break for some grocery shopping and a few chapters of the Wheel of Time (I’m re-reading, currently on the fourth book), I dove back into vector calculus. Today I was finishing up the chapter, and I got into the del operator, gradient, divergence, curl, etc. Aside from esoteric theory on curvilinear coordinates, this was pretty straightforward. It can get a bit tedious to work through the longer examples, but it is quite satisfying when it all comes together. And it’s nice to be able to follow what’s going on!
And in non-studying but sort of related news, the condo-buying process has been going pretty great. Inspection was done, no major red flags, attorney review is almost finished, and I may have a place to live for the fall soon! Which just makes me realize that this is all going to actually start happening very, very soon.